Blackwater CEO Lights Pants on Fire in <cite>WSJ</cite> Op-Ed

Blackwater CEO Erik Prince's op-ed in the *Wall Street Journal *is so full of spin, sugar-coating, and quarter-truths, I could spend all day debunking it. But I've got better things to do. So here's just one of Prince's many fishy assertions:

Every individual who has worked for Blackwater in Iraq has previously served in the U.S. military or as a police officer.

Not quite. Meet Shannon Campbell, who was a Blackwater employee in Baghdad. "Contrary to most independent contractors, who logically transition into the security industry after having careers in the military of law enforcement, Shannon just read a news article about mercenary outfits... and decided he'd found his calling," Robert Young Pelton writes in Licensed to Kill: Hired Guns in the War on Terror. "He ran up credit card debt and worked day jobs, such as managing his father-in-law's flower shops and funeral parlor, to pay for martial arts classes and bodyguard and weapons training, until he had racked up enough experience to break into the industry." So, clearly, not "every" Baghdad Blackwaterite is ex-cop or ex-military.

OK, OK, I can't resist. One more from Prince's opus:

Even amidst such an aggressive and ubiquitous enemy, Blackwater's incident reports during that time period show that personnel discharged their weapons less than one half of one percent of the time.

It's a statistic Prince has used before, before the House Oversight Committe. It's also completely meaningless."The
State Department and the military technically required comapnies to report each time they discharged a weapon, but whether they did so was up to them. Two security company officials estimated that just 15
percent of all shooting incidents were actually reported," writes Pulitzer Prize winner Steve Fainaru in his new book, Big Boy Rules: America's Mercenaries Fighting in Iraq. "One former
Blackwater operator told me that his team averaged four of five shootings a week, nearly four times the rate Prince quoted for the entire company" before Congress. One fib in an article full of 'em.

And before I go: Prince quoted a prosecutor in his piece, who said,
"Six individual Blackwater guards have been charged with unjustified shootings on September 16, 2007, not the entire Blackwater organization in Baghdad." Which is most certainly true. But one of the reasons that more contractors in that organization haven't been charged is that the
State Department has worked so hard "to play down incidents in which company operatives killed innocent Iraqis, according to Blackwater and State
Department documents obtained by a congressional committee."

McClatchy's Warren Strobel writes, "When a drunken Blackwater contractor killed a bodyguard of Iraq's vice president last Christmas Eve, the State Department helped spirit the contractor out of the country within 36 hours."

*When a Blackwater contract employee killed an Iraqi in Hillah in June
2005, the State Department asked the firm to pay $5,000 in compensation. "(W)e are all better off getting this case — and any similar cases — behind us quickly," a department official wrote...

On Sept. 24, 2006, a Blackwater detail driving on the wrong side of the road caused a red Opal driven by an Iraqi to skid into a Blackwater vehicle, hit a telephone pole and burst into flames. Blackwater personnel collected people and equipment from their disabled vehicle and left without aiding those in the Iraqi vehicle, described as being
"in a ball of flames," according to a company report.
*

On Nov. 28, 2005, a Blackwater motorcade making a round-trip journey to
Iraq's Oil Ministry collided with 18 different vehicles, according to another company document. Team members' written accounts of the incident were found by the company to be "invalid, inaccurate and, at best, dishonest reporting."

Sounds like a company habit.

[Photo: Rolling Stone]